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Pipe dreams: the 20-year rural water and sewer promise

An excavator sits next to a pit where crews are continuing construction on the RMWB's Rural Water and Sewer Projects along Northland Drive in Conklin, Alta. on Monday, Sept. 11, 2017. Cullen Bird/Fort McMurray/Wood Buffalo

Note: This article is the second in a two-part series about Wood Buffalo's Rural Water and Sewer Projects and how they will affect lives in the region's southern hamlets. If you have not done so already, please read "Pipe dreams: rural water, sewer still a luxury for some" before continuing.

The rural water and sewer program is the largest infrastructure project in the municipality’s history.

During the next three years the municipality will spend a projected $301 million - with up to $54 million possibly covered by provincial and federal grants - building water and sewage pipelines for roughly 2,700 people in six communities south of Fort McMurray, as well as new roads. In the upcoming months, contracts worth more than $117 million will be handed out, according to the municipality.

The projects will also benefit Fort McMurray #468 First Nation, near Anzac, which has reached an agreement with the RMWB to hook up to the municipality’s water and sewer lines.

As with many quality-of-life projects in Wood Buffalo’s rural wards, the water and sewer projects will never be cost-effective. But that was never part of the promise the RMWB made to its rural communities.

That deal was struck in the 1995 amalgamation agreement that combined Fort McMurray and the surrounding hamlets into one municipality, whose borders encompass one of the richest tax bases in Canada.

On a per-capita basis, the RMWB is one of Canada’s wealthiest municipalities. In 2015, the municipal census counted 125,032 residents living within its borders, including oilsands workers in camps. In the last five years the RMWB’s combined capital and operating budgets have never dipped below $850 million.

A map showing the southern half of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo and the communities it contains. Image excludes northern hamlets of Fort McKay, Fort Chipewyan and the tiny community of Fort Fitzgerald (population: nine). Image taken from the RMWB's online Municipal Map Viewer.

Jim Carbery, a Fort McMurray councillor who served between 1992 and 2007, remembers that before amalgamation, Fort McMurray’s council was annoyed the city gained relatively little tax revenue from the oilsands plants in the rural areas.

Many of the workers who ran the plants lived in Fort McMurray, placing a strain on the city’s services and infrastructure.

These concerns found their way to the ears of the provincial government.

In 1994, a representative from the Progressive Conservative government told Fort McMurray’s council that the city needed to merge with the surrounding “Improvement Districts” and the communities they contained. These included Fort Chipewyan, Fort McKay, Conklin, Janvier, Anzac and Gregoire Lake Estates. If the city and the improvement districts did not amalgamate on their own, the province would intervene.

“Do it, or it will be done to you,” Carbery said in an August interview, recalling the official’s words.

During negotiations, the rural hamlets were convinced that joining would bring them a better quality of life and guarantee basic services - fire safety, policing, emergency services, garbage collection and piped water and sewer.

And so, on April 1, 1995, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo was born.

Fort Chipewyan and Fort McKay already had water and sewage pipelines. The communities south of Fort McMurray did not have either. Saprae Creek had piped water, but relied on septic tanks.

How the new municipality would deliver on its promise was never well defined, Carbery said.

“I presumed that council somewhere down the way would meet these requirements. But there was never [a] timeline put on them,” he said.

“I’ll be quite honest, from my point of view we didn’t give the depth of thought to it as maybe we should have.”

The municipality could not have acted immediately on the projects even if it wanted to, according to Mayor Melissa Blake, first elected as a councillor in 1998 and now finishing her fourth and final term as mayor.

The first budget she looked at after being elected focussed on slashing expenses, she said.

“We didn’t have enough to take care of the regular business, let alone to enhance the services right throughout the region.”

The turning point came after 2006, she said, when the province finally began investing millions of dollars in the region to accommodate growth in the oilsands.

In 2009, council voted to hike rural non-residential property taxes - which includes oilsands projects - by 10 per cent.

In the meantime, many new projects that had been under construction came online, producing oil and property tax revenues, Blake said.

Even now, with oilsands growth slowed, the municipality’s combined operating and capital budgets for 2017 was $860.5 million. Property taxes are the municipality’s greatest revenue generator, with 95 per cent of its property tax revenue coming from taxes on oilsands projects.

There are steps the municipality could have taken if it did not have the money in hand, argued Darryl Woytkiw, Anzac resident and president of the Willow Lake Community Association.

The municipality could have have borrowed the funds, he said, when construction costs and interest rates were lower.

The RMWB has made more headway on providing recreation opportunities for rural residents. In the last ten years, several major recreation centres in Anzac, Conklin and Fort Chipewyan have been built or have begun construction.

“The critics will say we were focused on recreation in those communities, but it wasn’t that,” Blake said.

“But it was just that trying to get rural water and sewer is a much more onerous thing that gets taken into account for the budget.”

The municipality did run a water and sewer tank grant program for rural residents from 1998 to 2002, providing $3,325 for upgrades to existing tanks or $6,650 for new tank systems.

Everyone living in Wood Buffalo’s rural service area was eligible and more than 260 residents received grant funding, the municipality said in an emailed statement.

At the time the grant program started, Conklin resident Kirk Reid was a teenager living alone in his house, having moved back to the hamlet from his family’s new home in Edmonton. After the program ended, he submitted applications, but was turned down, he said.

In recent years the rural communities have become more organized and much louder when lobbying for municipal infrastructure and services.

Last year’s creation of the Rural Coalition was a response to repeated threats to rural projects on council.

If the hamlets had not rallied for every council vote on the rural water and sewer program, it would likely never have reached this point, Woytkiw said.

“If it was to come onto the table now, there's no way we would be able to make it happen, given the economic circumstances that we’re in,” Blake said.

A new municipal council will be sworn in after election day on Oct. 16 and regardless of its attitude towards rural infrastructure projects, the water and sewer projects will already be well under way.

Conklin resident Kirk Reid sits beside the metal tub he uses for bathing, since his house does not have indoor plumbing, in Conklin, Alta. on Monday, Sept. 11, 2017. When the municipality completes its water and sewer pipelines in the hamlet in late 2019, Reid will not be able to connect to them. Cullen Bird/Fort McMurray Today/Postmedia Network.

The RMWB has a responsibility to help homeowners like Kirk Reid, who lack the infrastructure to hook up to the new water and sewer lines, said Conklin Community Association president Ernie Desjarlais.

“That’s our elected mayor and all of council there. I’m sure we belong to [the municipality], and they should be helping us out,” Desjarlais said in a Tuesday interview.

Otherwise, he fears people like Reid will be left behind when the rest of the community connects to the new water and sewer system.

Once the pipelines are completed, the municipality will cancel its subsidized water and sewage trucking services, leaving people to get these services from private businesses.

The Rural Coalition will continue to fight for rural projects long after the water and sewer projects are completed, Woytkiw said.

He hopes the projects will go smoothly from now on, fulfilling a promise of a better life in Wood Buffalo’s hamlets.